Some Painter Questions
polycounter lvl 8
I've been working through substance painter at the moment as I am hoping to use it for painting some terrain, the tools and masking seem like something that could work very well for the project I'm working on but of course there are lots of questions flapping around in my head and though it would be better to post a few in one place rather then spitting them into lots of different threads. Sorry about the big mass of questions!
-Is there any way to do Height map blending? I'd like to just pull and push one height map through another and mask. IE Pushing paving stones up through sand? You see this a lot in editors like unreal and does a great job on terrain.
-How does the workflow work for substance > painter? Do the output names in my sub just automatically link with the correct channels in painter?
-Do custom channels work? IE "Mask"
-Can a self contained material also be plugged into the mask channel and mask its self? Or do i need to build 2 version of a graph, one "Material" and another "Mask"
Lets say i have built a rocky substance and want to push the rocks up through the sand, i could see my self here using the height map as a mask.
-I guess I can paint into the height map and then some how transfer normal and AO back into the textures? How does that work?
-Is it possible to link textures from Painter Back into Substance?
Say I'm using AO as a mask to place stones in my substance, can I paint AO into an object in Painter and watch stones be placed through the substance graph?
Are there any of the warp, blur type tools you find in Designer to warp and blur masks? I mean, Slope blur for example.
Again sorry for the big wall of text, I guess im having lots of ideas about how i can get painter plugged into my workflow and not sure what i can and cannot do.
Ta
-Is there any way to do Height map blending? I'd like to just pull and push one height map through another and mask. IE Pushing paving stones up through sand? You see this a lot in editors like unreal and does a great job on terrain.
-How does the workflow work for substance > painter? Do the output names in my sub just automatically link with the correct channels in painter?
-Do custom channels work? IE "Mask"
-Can a self contained material also be plugged into the mask channel and mask its self? Or do i need to build 2 version of a graph, one "Material" and another "Mask"
Lets say i have built a rocky substance and want to push the rocks up through the sand, i could see my self here using the height map as a mask.
-I guess I can paint into the height map and then some how transfer normal and AO back into the textures? How does that work?
-Is it possible to link textures from Painter Back into Substance?
Say I'm using AO as a mask to place stones in my substance, can I paint AO into an object in Painter and watch stones be placed through the substance graph?
Are there any of the warp, blur type tools you find in Designer to warp and blur masks? I mean, Slope blur for example.
Again sorry for the big wall of text, I guess im having lots of ideas about how i can get painter plugged into my workflow and not sure what i can and cannot do.
Ta
Replies
The answer to the channels stuff is on the Allegorithmic site in the documentation. You need to follow specific naming conventions to pick up baked maps and custom channel based inputs are possible. The short answer is basically yes to everything.
Warp etc are there as filters already, if you're not happy with those, making new ones is easy.
Getting height back into AO/normal can be done with anchor points
You can do pretty much everything you've mentioned but in my experience you're best off building tools that suit painter rather than trying to put designer into painter.
Performance is a huge issue for a start - a half second delay in processing is fine if you're moving sliders but it's a disaster if you're trying to paint interactively and that pretty much rules out any complex, reactive material behaviour. It's much better to build mask generators, tools and filters that work in conjunction with simple materials